


the first of his name

by Larrant



Category: Original Work
Genre: Gen, a weird mesh of muse and mumbling and metaphors, countries as people
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-12
Updated: 2016-12-12
Packaged: 2018-09-08 03:42:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,015
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8828989
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Larrant/pseuds/Larrant
Summary: a country, and a boy.





	

 

 

He is born into searing, hot light. He is born, and he has no memory.

He grows up in the urban city, with the flash of lights at night and the smell of petrol in the air.

When he is twelve, his parents send him to England. His mother works in government. His father is a businessman. He stays at an expensive boarding school and learns stuttering vowels and awkward sentences.

He graduates from secondary school, goes to sixthform. And then university. And he does not know where he is meant to be.

University is strange- full of people who are not quite adults and not quite children, and he wonders about that, sometimes.

There’s a woman one day, in the bar downtown. Her hair is red and she smiles a jagged, sharp smile. He joins her by the bar, she pays for his tab.

She laughs, and when she leans forward the cuffs of her jacket snag, pull up to reveal white tattoos tracing her wrists. He doesn’t need to look to know they reach to her elbows, up her arm, crawling in the fashion of flames.

She is the first he meets.

“Memory is what makes us,” she tells him, and he thinks he understands. “History gives us our names.”

There are landmines pitted in the hollows of her cheeks, scars traced into the lines of her smile. She gives him a kiss before she leaves, smoke and vodka and the scent of mint. He falls a little bit in love.

 

* * *

 

When he returns to his home place, to the place his bones finally feel at rest at, he does not forget.

“Are you the first?” The man next to him in the queue asks, and he nods because he is, because he has no memory of anything else. He is unsurprised, somehow, as if he has known this man all his life.

The man smiles, faintly. “I hope you will not be the last.”

“There was no-one to welcome you,” the man says. And then, before he moves forward to the cashier. “You will have to find out, by yourself.”

He pays for his groceries- a bottle of milk, a cabbage, and a packet of dried plums he'd found lying in the wrong aisle- and doesn't think about it any further.

 

* * *

 

He is a man himself, by the time she finds him.

 _She_ finds him in a bar, pulls him a seat next to her, and he buys her a vodka, because it’s the same drink another woman bought for him, a long long time ago.

The woman tilts her head, cigarette smoke and engine fuel between her teeth.

“Why am I here,” he asks, because he is and he is not and perhaps it is because of that that he does not understand.

“Belief,” she tells him. “Enough belief, and history lets you be so.”

He wonders about that, twisting his glass between his fingers.

“There used to be many of us, here.” Her shark teeth glint gold in the half-light. She is beautiful, she is old. “But they stopped believing in many, they started believing in one. So we became one.”

“Will I be the last?” He asks. It seems strange.

It seems _disappointing_ , to be the first, and then to be the last.

She shrugs, “You will not be the last.” She is careless with her words, spilling like engine fuel from a pump. “We all become memory. We will become one.”

He nods, and there’s relief in his heart, frozen jet fuel splintering in his bones. He goes home that night, he looks himself in the mirror.

He is terrified of no longer being, he thinks, and all the same he thinks it is only right.

 

* * *

 

The years pass, he is still lost. And finally, when he is old, an old man, he finds what he is looking for.

Deep into dusk, he walks the streets and finds an old block down an alleyway, and stops. He goes in, pushes the open gate and walks the stairs to the fourth floor. He’s out of breath and his walking stick is too heavy. He goes to the fifth door down the corridor, reaches a bony hand through the bars and knocks.

There are pattering footsteps, and he can only wait, breath stoppered in his throat. A boy opens the door for him, disheveled, dressed in a t-shirt and shorts too big for him. He takes one look at the old man before he smiles.

The boy must have been waiting. The man had never realized, had never known except for the feeling of it. But he was the first, and there was no-one before him, he could be forgiven for that.

They go to the park together, sit on a bench together, his feet on the cool concrete and the boy’s feet kicking in the air.

“Will I be the last?” The boy asks, after a moment, and his eyes are following a butterfly in the air.

“That depends on them,” he replies, and he does not know what he expected. He thinks he is glad he will not be alone after all, he will not have been the only one. It would have been strange, becoming memory, to have the one after him not be _his_.

“I don’t want to be the last,” the boy says, and the old man blinks.

In truth part of him has always been afraid, part of him has always been waiting. He had never expected for another to come, another to take his name. But they are all different he thinks now, they were people more than countries, and he had never had the knowledge of that.

“That is up to you,” he says because he is fulfilled, because it’s no longer his turn, and he realizes he is glad with how things turned out after all.

The boy turns and smiles at him, and everything in him seems like light, “Thank you," the boy says, with laughter on his tongue and history in his eyes. "I won't let them forget you."

 

 

 


End file.
